hard disk fun == down time

[Christopher Faylor <cgf@redhat.com>]

My attempts to use /dev/hda4 last night proved disastrous.  I believe
that there is a kernel bug which causes linux to screw up with very
large hard disks like /dev/hda.

The end result was that when I wrote to /dev/hda4, I was also randomly
writing to /dev/hda3.

It obviously took a long time for us to recover from this and I *know*
that there are still issues on /sourceware/www (aka /dev/hda3).  My apologies
for the long down time.  We're going to investigate what went wrong here
and try to improve on it.

If you see any oddness on this partition please send email to overseers.
I hope that we'll be able to have everything completely restored in the
next week or so.  For the time being, basic functionality on this
partition seems to be restored.

You can look at web pages but the most affected part of the partition
seemed to be the mailing list archives.  There is probably information
missing there.

Phew.  It's hard doing sysadmin duties when you're 3000 miles from the
machine in question.

cgf